


A Messy Manifesto: Incest in Life and Fandom [NOT A FIC]

by Anonymous



Category: Original Work, RWBY, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Arguments, Bigotry & Prejudice, Civil Rights Movement, Cousin Incest, Discourse, Essay, Homophobia, Incest, Multi, Non Fiction, Philosophy, Politics, Racism, Rant, Sibling Incest, Step-Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:40:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27072877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: THIS IS NOT A FANFICI just had a moment. This is a rant/essay I suddenly felt compelled to write after hearing about incest shipping on twitter.I cover Genetic Defects, Reproduction as a staple of romantic/sexual relationships, Family Dynamics, and Power Dynamics.I also discuss the interpretation of Catra and Adora as adopted sisters, And at some point I go off on a tangent about a fanfic I never finished.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Ruby Rose/Yang Xiao Long
Comments: 12
Kudos: 30





	A Messy Manifesto: Incest in Life and Fandom [NOT A FIC]

Ok I'm finally doing this. I know this isn’t a fanfic, or any kind of story, but since it’s related to things I’ve written (orphaned) and may write in the future; and since it’s kind of a big deal in fandom culture, I’m just gonna go ahead and rant about it here. The topic is incest. I’ve just been set off by a big tweet hating on incest (specifically step sibling incest) in shipping. If it wasn’t clear already, I am not anti-incest. I hesitate to call myself pro-incest, but I’ll get into those kinds of details later. I consider the common anti-incest sentiment to be bigoted and reactionary. It is based in people’s immediate sense of disgust as opposed to a consistent application of moral standards. I’m going to explain here why I believe that the same moral standards that tell us to be accepting of LGBT people/relationships, mixed race relationships, and other things associated with Leftism and Liberalism, would also lead us to accept (generally) people who wish to be in incestuous relationships.

Just gonna add a hook here. Hoping I can keep a few more readers. Hello fans of She-ra and the princesses of power. I too am a fan. Do you remember when the fandom was divided over whether Catra and Adora had a sisterly relationship, or a more romantic/sexually inclined relationship? Oh boy have I got news for you. It’s both. I can’t believe y’all couldn’t rub your mid-strife brain cells together to come up with the beautiful synthesis that it’s both. I mean, clearly everyone has accepted the idea that Shadow Weaver is effectively Catra and Adora’s abusive mother. And soooo. What does that make them to each other? The answer is sisters. They are essentially adopted siblings. They were raised together since they were babies, or at least very small children. They cohabitated. They were close. They shared a mother figure. And no, the fact that they didn’t learn about concepts like family and siblings doesn’t change anything. You aren’t disgusted by the idea of doing the freaky with your siblings because you were taught that they were your siblings. You’re disgusted by it because of the Westermarck effect which causes you to not be attracted to people you were constantly around as a small child. (obviously this effect is not universal.) having a specific word for that sort of relationship wouldn’t change anything. Anyway, great, now hopefully I’ve hooked you in by showing you that a popular canon ship in a popular show is incest. Best case scenario you now feel the need to see how you can defend your favorite ship. 

I just wanna add a real quick explanation about why I’m passionate about this. It started with my decision to be as socially progressive as possible. To be clear, that means I don’t ever want to be that person who is relatively progressive, yet still bigoted towards a certain group, just because there isn’t yet a popular movement for them yet. I don’t want to be the person who in the 70’s or whenever, was totally in favor of LGB rights… but then kinda felt weird about trans people. Or the slavery abolitionist who was like “well yeah I don’t think black people should be slaves but… they shouldn’t be our  _ equals _ .” It started like that, and I've become more passionate about it over time as it’s become integrated with my ego. So when I see people act like anyone who supports incest is a terrible disgusting person, it’s personal, because  _ I _ support the right of two consenting adult siblings to be ‘more than just siblings’. So now I'm implicated and I want to defend myself as well. I just hate how difficult it is to be open about this kind of thing. People in fandom communities frequently lump support of incest with support of things like pedophilia. They put it in their profiles and say don’t follow me. I will block you. Do not interact. This is insane to me. Following this paragraph I'll start laying out an argument in a more “cold and rational” way. But later I wanna try and actually make people empathize with these people. Like have you ever considered their feelings?

First of all let me just bypass the surprisingly weak first line of defense so many anti’s

seem to have. I’ve seen so many people immediately jump to examples or hypotheticals of something like a grown adult sexually abusing a child they are related to. Yes this is incest. Yes this is immoral. Absolutely unacceptable. Because it is also rape. It is child abuse. The same way gay sexual acts beteen a grown man and a little boy are immoral and unacceptable. This does not make gay sex or gay relationships or gayness immoral in general. I am also aware that so many incidents… scratch that. So many  _ reported _ incidents of incestual relations have that sort of abusive nature. I certainly condemn those, but they still do not speak to the many relationships that don’t have those dynamics. I think it’s important to keep in mind that the statistics about incestual relationships usually come from people reporting abuse. If you’ll allow me to suggest that there exist happy, healthy incestuous relationships; They would not have any reason to report their relationship status, in fact everything about our culture would drive them to keep it secret. 

Just as a sort of aside, if you are having difficulty imagining how an incestuous relationship can be anything other than unhealthy and abusive, I’ll present you with this: a pair of 26 year old twins who are financially independent of each other and of their parents. For the next section it may help you to imagine the twins are the same sex.

So now I’ll get to the argument most people hear, and then decide it’s all over and they don’t need to think anymore. Genetic Disability. So we’ve all heard the thing where if you have children with someone closely related like a sibling, then they may have genetic defects. I’ll only briefly talk about actual reproduction because it’s probably complicated and isn’t the easy part of the argument. Really I’ll just say that the chance of a genetic defect in this situation is lower than you probably think. Actually I can’t find stats for sibling incest, but for first cousin incest the chance of genetic defects is about 4 percent. Compared to the general population at 2 percent. Not a big difference. Second point on reproduction is that if you are going to restrict incestual unions on the basis of increased likelihood of genetic defect, then you should also be similarly concerned with all people with genetic disorders, or inheritable health issues reproducing. For example, the general population risk for schizophrenia is 1 percent. Meanwhile for a child with a parent with schizophrenia, the risk is 10 percent. That’s significant. Probably similar to the increased rate of disorder from sibling incest. And schizophrenia is certainly a debilitating disorder to live with. In light of this knowledge, I would expect you to either come out against people with schizophrenia reproducing, or loosen your standards for incest. With sickle cell anemia, if both parents have it, there is a 1 in 4 chance the child will have it. Older women are significantly more likely than younger women to give birth to children with disorders such as down syndrome. “[with down syndrome]  The probability increases from less than 0.1% in 20-year-old mothers to 3% in those of age 45.” Should we consider not allowing women over 40-45 to reproduce? Now I think all of this is great to consider, but at the end of the day you might just be a fan of casual eugenics. Plenty of people are unwittingly so. Now I can move on to the fun part of this argument. 

Have you simply considered that reproduction is not an inherent part of romantic and sexual relationships? Like when it comes to heterosexual incest, we have so much at our disposal. Birth control is very common. Abortions are very common. Vasectomies exist, and are reversible. Did you know vasectomies are reversible? I didn’t. If you’re really so worried, just make incestuous reproduction illegal. I’m pretty sure two siblings who have fallen in love with each other would rather be told they can be together but not have a child together, than be told they just can’t be together at all. Ooh, and the really fun part is gay people exist. Two cis gay brothers aren’t gonna be making babies together anytime soon. 

Okay you can skip this paragraph, i just wanna say something about the RWBY fndm. Like damn, y’all really hate Enabler (ruby/yang) openly in the fandom, but it’s such a popular ship underneath. Y’all noticed right? Look at how many hits the average rwby fic gets on Ao3 after a month or two. Now look at enabler fics (you can sort by new and scroll down. Might take a few pages for genpop) Hell even I wrote (orphaned) an unfinished 2/? Chapter fic. It didn’t have a chance to go anywhere cus I got bored with it (and eventually afraid of it). Still it got like 1500 hits in a couple weeks. It’s not even decent. It was my first ever fic and my writing was kinda cringey. (it’s called A Ship Not Meant To Sail, if anyone was interested.) it was gonna be an intricate longfic about adult!ruby navigating the emotional turmoil of experiencing taboo feelings such as romantic and sexual attraction towards her older sister, with no hope that her feelings would ever be reciprocated. Ok, I’m so sorry but now I’m gonna talk about my dead plans for that story. It was gonna be a beautiful slow burn. The story would be primarily from Ruby’s perspective starting with her coming to terms with her attraction towards her sister. Like she’s repressed it for years, but now she can’t pretend she doesn’t feel what she feels anymore. All this time, without her knowledge (or the reader’s knowledge for a while) Yang feels the same way about her. Yang on the other hand has already accepted it and moved past it. Convinced that she could never and should never do anything about it, for fear of hurting her little sister. Then they both go off to college and ignore their feelings, despite having a few touching moments of emotional intimacy together. The story goes in the direction of establishing Ruby/Weiss and Yang/Blake, but before those relationships can get serious. Yang says something while black out drunk, and suddenly everything changes. This leads to ruby developing the courage to make her feelings known to yang. They argue. They kiss. They cry. The cat’s out of the bag between them. They don’t want to just go back to normal. But what will they tell their friends? Their family? Maybe nothing. Would their parents punish them? Disown them? Will their friends abandon them? Maybe they can hide it. How long could they bear that? And it’s not like this is just a crush. Please. You don’t call Friends to lovers “just a crush”. The feelings already run deep after you’ve loved each other platonically for so long. God I wish so bad that I never orphaned that story. I hope just by describing the outline of the story here, I can get you to have a little fucking empathy. Y’know the thing where you put yourself in someone else's shoes? So much potential wasted. Anyway, I think the difficulties I’ve just mentioned lead nicely into the next argument.

The next issue is… i guess “family dynamics”. I find this argument very frustrating because while I hear it from liberals, it comes off as strangely conservative. And while it seems clever and nuanced at first, if you follow it to its logical conclusion, it goes against what most of you would consider reasonable. The argument is basically: “incest is bad because it destroys the family unit”. In fact I encountered this in a tweet today. “As someone who watched my brother and stepsister date/ fall in love w/ each other: Don’t. It makes everyone in the family uncomfortable as fuck. It ruined whole relationships.” Now, the first time i heard an argument like this a few years ago, I actually had to consider it for a moment. It seems like it’s pointing out a clear harm done by this kind of relationship. But there’s one glaring issue that really sticks out. Here watch what happens if I re-word that tweet. (this time for context, think ~1950s America): “As someone who watched my Sister fall in love with a black man: Don’t. It makes everyone in the family uncomfortable as fuck. It ruined whole relationships.”. Do you see what I did there? I replace the modernly unacceptable relationship with a historically unacceptable relationship. I could also do this for gays, altho i think the logic holds better with bisexuals. My uncle is super homophobic. If my cousin (his son) were bisexual for example, and he decided to date another man, it would certainly cause a lot of strife and discord in the family bond. Pretty sure his brother would side with him. But see my uncle is a fundamentalist Christian, and he’s very sure that his interpretation of the bible is entirely objective and totally not thru the lens of someone who was already indoctrinated by older conservative Christian beliefs. He would absolutely not budge. So what is our conclusion? Do we conclude that it would be immoral for my cousin to date another man? Would it be immoral for that hypothetical sister to fall in love with a black guy just because her racist family would hate her, maybe disown her for it? It seems more like we would want to place the blame on the people who refuse to accept diversity of love? We say with the racists that it wouldn’t be an issue if they would learn to be less racist and accept black people. We would say the same of my homophobic uncle. So why on earth don’t we say that the family of that twitter user should learn to be more accepting of incest relationships? It would solve the family destruction problem. I can imagine people saying it’s different because incest just automatically makes everyone uncomfy. Well I promise, just like we all got used to watching two men kiss on television, you can get used to hearing about incest. The disgust factor comes primarily from the fact that we aren’t used to it. It also comes from the weird way people tend to think of their own siblings every time they hear about incest, and it skeeves them out. Why do we do this? Idk, but I promise, that goes away as you get used to hearing about incest. I think the same thing happens with homophobic men. And then it generates this weird reactionary response from people where they’re like “Ew.  _ I _ would never fuck my sibling. I’m disgusted by that. How could anybody want to do that?”... and I mean, how is that different from what homophobes used to say about gay stuff? It’s ok, it’s not about you. Different strokes.

Also don’t forget there isn’t just one way people have family relationships. Some people grow up and then just barely talk to their parents or siblings anymore. In which case there isn’t much of a family bond to blow up. Who are you to police the way people associate with their kin anyway? Some people are just better off leaving. Sometimes your family is shitty and transphobic so you get the fuck out and find new people. Found-family trope anyone? Sometimes the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb lads. 

I just remembered there’s another thing. Power Dynamics basically. People are like “oh no, if your sibling is one or two years older than you then they will forever hold power over you.” which I think is kind of silly in the first place. I Think adult siblings don’t typically have this issue unless we’re talking about some sort of weird wealthy corporate family dynasty where you guys can fight over your father’s will or something. Furthermore, we only police power dynamics to a limited extent. For example you usually can’t date your employees. (GOOD) But there are so many smaller power dynamics we don’t think about. Should we say a tall powerful man can’t date a frail young woman? Can an upper class person date a lower class person? Can a PhD date a high school dropout? Can a youtuber date a fan? Usually we don’t have much to say about these things. When it comes to sibling incest, I can’t really see how power dynamics would generally exceed these levels of difference. 

  
So yeah. I’m tired now. I’m gonna go drink monster energy and cry about my lack of will to study for my Linear Algebra test. If you made it this far I'll be a little transparent with you (and if you know me IRL , no you don’t). I do have a  _ thing  _ for the onee-chan trope. Like something about the overly doting older sister thing is just super appealing to me, even when I was a young innocent child. Not just sexually, I mean the whole package. I didn’t want to make this known earlier in case people just wanted to dismiss me without considering the arguments, like “haha, gross deviant trying to justify her fetish. whatever”. that’s really not that case. (I also wouldn’t call it a fetish.) I’m trying to support people (and characters) in incestual relationships in general, not as someone's masturbatory material. (and honestly let’s not pretend a sizeable portion of the population doesn’t have an incest kink. Hell, have you guys seen the porn-hub insights for the past few years? If you didn’t I’ll let you in on the hot gossip. Step-Sister and Step-mother were in the top 5 or maybe top 3 categories for a couple years recently. That’s not just sorta popular. That’s some top of your class, valedictorian shit.)


End file.
